Wednesday, March 23, 2011
Home Burial
such small hands
e.e. cummings, "somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond"
somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near
your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose
or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing
(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands
Such Small Hands
Tuesday, March 8, 2011
Mending Wall
Discussion today about Mending Wall had me thinking about a lot of possibilities and connections that the wall could mean. After reading "Metaphor and the Authenticating Act of Memory," I came across a line that said, "every metaphor is a riddle." In Frost's poem, it is the wall that is the riddle. We have already established that it is separating the neighbors, but it is doing this in a multiplicity of layers: literally, it separates them. Philosophically, it separates them. It is a segregation between two different intellectual capacities: one that can live with whatever comes his way, the other afraid to step outside the boundaries that "the way things OUGHT to be" have laid out for him. While the speaker is listening to his inherent and natural questioning of the wall's purpose, the neighbor is stubborn, ignorant, unwilling to undergo CHANGE.
While we were talking, I kept thinking of historical references: Why did people in the dark ages allow themselves to be ruled by a small group of elite people, fat with wealth and greed. How did they come out of the dark ages? By GRASPING change, not resisting it. By embracing a broken down wall and allowing the "gaps" to be explored as windows of opportunities to a new outlook on life. Positive events happened because of this change: the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, America's independence from England, and countless other things aside from European history. One can view the wall as the element of tradition, with it's firm foundation built "stone on a stone." But that "SOMETHING," whether it's a stream of unconsciousness, intuition, God's will, or an inexplainable force of nature, invites the speaker's curiosity to question....why?
"I could say "Elves" to him, But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather He said it for himself." One interpretation of this could be that the speaker is suffering to see his neighbor not question the wall's existence, or (LACK of existence when it continues to fall.) He yearns for his neighbor to realize that "Elves" aren't "exactly" the explanation. It could be a martian or deranged gnome for that matter! The speaker is witnessing someone who is unable to think for himself and make his own decisions because he is haunted by "his father's saying." Even though the neighbor is not physically suffering, he may symbolically succumb to the oppression of the norm. And the norm may not always be the right path for everybody. People blindly follow the norms without realizing it, and won't realize they know something until somebody spoon-feeds it to them. The exciting part of a human's mental development is being able to engage in mystery of the unknown. How is it mystery if somebody tells you it's "elves?" There may not always be an answer for everything even though that is what we are constantly searching for.
Thoughts on Mending Wall
One of the first things I noticed when studying this poem was the fact that the things that break the wall down are all natural occurrences.
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun.
Nature is competing with the walls existence and essentially tearing it down. By repairing the wall year after year, the narrator is acknowledging that they are fighting with nature, which he clearly sees as fruitless. This fits into the viewpoint that the neighbor is existing in denial of nature - in denial of man’s innate desire for community, in denial of the temporary nature of life on earth, and consequently even in denial of death itself.
In a more concrete sense, even earthly happenings fight the existence of the wall - hunters who have no time to pass slowly through the barriers erected by the neighbors and who tear them apart without a thought, leaving them to be mended in the Spring.
Whatever the cause, the wall is constantly being broken down and repaired, although it is not necessary. Nothing is being walled in or walled out. There aren’t grazing animals or quickly expanding crops.
Another thing that I found interesting looking over the poem was that although the neighbors (or at least one of them) seem intent on living in segregation, they come together to build the wall. The wall is theirs; Neither is absolute owner. This is why the pronoun ‘we’ is constantly used in the poem. It seems as if this idea of the communal wall contradicts the entire context of the poem. It creates that tension that makes a work worth its while.
Friday, March 4, 2011
John Keats: Ode to Grecian Urn and Bright Star
John Keats: Ode to Grecian Urn and Bright Star
There is so much to say about John Keats and not near the time to say it. I actually had a lot of fun, YES fun, memorizing the section from Ode to the Grecian Urn. I wished I could have presented out loud, but I struggled to get the last 2 lines perfect. As we know, to mess up a word is messing up a whole lot more. If each word is chosen with care, to mess up a word is to be irresponsible with someone else’s hard work, effort, and care. I found the actual poem beautiful, and I don’t know the full details of why. I greatly appreciate the romanticism of it and the pace that the romanticism offers. The formalities Keats follows remind me of the formalities that one must follow to court a lady(especially from the time when Keats was alive). As we saw in Bright Star, John Keats was a hopeless romantic and fell for a romantic as well. The two together brought up great points for love and poetry in their conversations. So many quotes from this movie will forever stay with me. For example: when she looks completely disheveled and asks her mother, “Is this love?” I found this so striking, beautiful, and raw. I was jealous as a filmmaker how wonderfully they captured and conveyed the intensity of the love and loss so well. Every second in that scene was its own poem and its own photograph to me. Another amazing quote and metaphor from the film, was the amazing incite into poetry by viewing it as a swim in a lake. One does not just dive into the lake to immediately swim to the side and get out. One swims in the lake and “luxuriates” in the lake. This is something that I continually need to make myself aware of and practice at. I am so used to trying to plan my day out to the minute, and I never allow myself to luxuriate in much of anything, but when planning time for this class I definitely need to allow more time to indulge in the poems, perhaps their slow pace or their complexities that I do not immediately understand.
--Kelly J.
HTRAP: Ch. 2
Chapter 2: What is Poetry?
--Kelly J.
The quiz on this chapter was interesting. I admit I didn’t feel like I answered confidently to the questions, which was good because it encouraged me to reread the chapter.
Though even after I read it, I still got hung up on the poem, “This is Just to Say,” by William Carlos Williams. I have trouble understanding why he wrote it. What it means? Why he would put such care into words choice only to say nothing important.
HTRAP: CH 5
Thoughts on One Art
Thursday, March 3, 2011
One Art Response
When I first read the first line, I thought that Bishop was talking about losing in a sports match or video game. I anticipated that the poem would be about sportsmanship and growing from adversity. However, Bishop uses the word "losing" vaguely. She uses it to mean several things ranging from physically misplacing something to wasting time to experiencing a disconnection from ones home. It appears the art of losing is all to easy to master for the poet, and has lead to her losing everything in her life.
As far as form is concerned, the poem features enjambment throughout, which lead me to feel as though I was stumbling through the poem awkwardly. When considering form, the last stanza stands out because it is four lines while the rest are three. This makes the last stanza stand out and draws attention to it, forcing the reader to consider it more closely. The content of the final stanza is also seemingly more significant than the rest of the story. It is clear that all the author's losses became progressively more serious building up to the last stanza, and in the final stanza she addresses the person for whom the poem is intended, the person whom she lost. But she goes on to say even losing "you" was ultimately easy, which can be interpreted as the authors final admission that she has lost so much that she can lose anything easily.
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
Ch 5 Part II HTRAP in connection with todays class
I just finished reading the second part of ch.5 of HTRAP. There were so many observations and connections with the poems we read today, that I decided to share them. Plus, it was pointed out that making connections to other literature or even our observations to other literature helps us develop a clearer understanding:
"Syntax is pressed into the service of a tenacious commitment to truth, as each proposition threatens to cancel out the previous claim in a dogged struggle to pin down just what the speaker feels." This reminded me a lot of Dream Song 29. We discussed how Berryman began sentences with prepositions and ordered the words of this poem in a strange, and unusual way. Not the same kind of way that we would read a poem by Keats. Authors all have their own way of formulating a thought similar to the way we formulate our word choice in conversations. It's important to understand syntactical differences to develop a flexibility in conversations as well as reading literature. Where some authors are fluid and rich in language others "left the untidy stitches on his tapestry visible."
This portion of the chapter also discussed the "doubts, shifts of viewpoint" that occur in a poem. One Art was a clear example of this because the casual tone at the beginning changed to a scattered and almost defeated one at the end when the speaker had to force herself to "(write it!)." When I read this I couldn't help but think about the "full circle" endings we so often witness in literature. Maybe the poem starts off in one way, but goes through a transformation rapidly and builds toward the end. This isn't to say that ALL poems do this, but it is another way which sets poetry aside from the prose of a novel. The shifts in viewpoint take a faster risk in poetry.
The shifts in viewpoint correspond to the paradoxes and ambiguity that is often present in poetry. Since poems "do not come readily equipped with material contexts" to define a certain "meaning," we have to be open observers of irony and tonal changes within the language. "The split between how you are and how you appear" also reminded me of One Art. The speaker attempts to appear to be fine and dandy, but what she is...is not.
Another interesting element of this chapter was about rhyme. Too often I end up writing poems that rhyme because of that "sense of security." Not that anything is wrong with rhyme, but it is important to know when to use it. For instance, if one was going to write of feelings about disassociation, alienation, disconnection, failure, the feeling that everything is falling apart....one might want to write with that style. Perfect rhyme endings can give that aura of truth and perfection, but "para-rhymes" can also change the atmosphere of a poem as demonstrated by the "eerie quality" of Wilfred Owen's poem.
Thoughts on One Art
Walking back from class today, I kept thinking about the poem One Art, which we discussed at the beginning of class. Outside of the classroom, I was able to take a step back and consider the poem from a new perspective. When I reread it, I started to wonder if perhaps whoever is writing the poem has been choosing to lose the items mentioned in the poem (this would require in some instances the idea of the items as symbolic). I started to think of some one who perhaps gave up all of the comforts of life for her art or her goals. I think that the tone could coincide with this idea - the sort of forced, carefree nature. I was looking at it as of the speaker was an artist. It is supported by the mentions of isolation, which could be considered to be self imposed isolation rather than a literal loss of community. It also is supported by the mentions of financial loss and loss of comfort.
Then, at the end it could be argued that whoever the person who was ‘lost’ is someone who fell by the wayside in the speakers search for success or vision, or whatever the unmentioned goal may be.
It’s out there, but I do think the support is present in the poem to make this a viable interpretation.